The federal bureaucracy is too dependent on Canberra for its workforce and needs to redeploy more staff outside the national capital, a government report said.
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The Australian Public Service (APS) is in the midst of a recruitment crisis, exacerbated by the ACT’s extremely low unemployment rate, which is trending at 3 percent.
While only 38 percent of APS’s 160,000 employees work in the capital, it is home to the vast majority of senior executives and policy officers.
However, a group of heads of government departments say this “Canberra-centric” approach to staffing is undermining APS.
They are preparing a location strategy, parts of which are detailed in the latest State of the Service Report.
That report says basing more senior jobs in Canberra discourages a broader search for the best candidate.
This poses “a significant risk in attracting and retaining the right skills and capabilities of the workforce,” it says.
“As a result, recruitment is not targeting high-demand occupations where they are (i.e. in New South Wales, Victoria and Queensland).
“This means that the APS is missing out on opportunities to find talent, especially for high-demand occupations.”
A spokesperson for the Public Service Commission told the ABC that the COVID-19 pandemic had “shown that we can work well at all levels from dispersed locations”.
“This includes performing all types of work, including policy officers.”
